Jung, Freud colleague no longer lost in time

`My Name was Sabina Spielrein'

(star)(star)(star)

March 03, 2006|By Michael Wilmington, Tribune movie critic

(Sweden/Switzerland/Denmark/Finland; Elisabeth Marton, 2002)

A docudrama with an amazing human subject and an affecting, poetic style, director Elisabeth Marton's "My Name was Sabina Spielrein" tells the compelling story of one of those significant people all but lost to history until long-buried journals bring their lives to light.

In this case, the woman is Sabina Spielrein, a Russian-Jewish bourgeois girl who, starting in 1904, was the young Carl Jung's patient and later his lover, as well as Jung and Sigmund Freud's eventual colleague and a major figure in psychiatry in Geneva, Vienna and Moscow. Rejected by the married Jung, she entered a loveless marriage, had a daughter and finally became a Holocaust victim.

Marton tells this romantic and tragic story economically and imaginatively, through a combination of omniscient narration and actors' readings of the trio's letters. (Eva Osterberg touchingly reads Spielrein's.) Using mostly black and white photography, with a few startling bursts of full color, Marton combines intriguing archival images and her own lyrical, expressive re-creations of the past.

The story could have been told as a conventional drama, but I doubt it would have been more effective. It's the real words of the three--and the fact that these affairs and events actually took place--that move us. Most moving perhaps is Spielrein's own epitaph, conceived in youth and recalled after her death. She wishes her body to be burned, her ashes scatted in a big field and a large oak planted there, with a sign recalling that here too was a human being whose "name was Sabina Spielrein." Marton's movie, like the oak, makes sure that we won't forget her. (In English and German, with English subtitles.)